The earliest phonograph records were designed with small diameter centering holes and were to be employed on phonograph record turntables that rotate at seventy-eight r.p.m. Record players were soon designed to be able to handle a stacked plurality of records to provide continuous playing without interruption. In order to achieve this continuous type of playing operation, a spindle was employed which included the use of a spring biased elongated blade which mechanically caused the records to drop one at a time when desired.
Within recent times, there has been developed a small diameter forty-five r.p.m. record which employs the use of a comparatively large center hole. This type of record cannot be directly employed on the small diameter centering spindle of a conventional type of phonograph record player.
While a limited amount of record players were developed and were restricted for use with the 45 r.p.m. type of record, the greatest popular demand was, and is, for record players with narrow diameter spindles that accommodate the standard 78 r.p.m. records. The 45 r.p.m. records could be played on these record players by employing the use of some form of an adaptor to be mounted on the smaller diameter record changer spindle with the adaptor to accommodate the larger diameter hole in the 45 r.p.m. record.
Previously, such adaptors took different forms. One form employed the use of a wafer that was inserted in the center hole of each of the 45 r.p.m. records. These types of wafers did not experience popular consumer acceptance primarily due to inconvenience and inordinate expense. Additionally, a further deficiency lies in the poor operation of the record changer when using such wafer inserts.
A second form of adaptor took the form of a structure which was mounted directly onto the phonograph spindle. These adaptors have taken numerous forms in the past. One universal deficiency of such prior art adaptors has been the complicating of the construction of the adaptor. The adaptors have been designed to function to drop the 45 r.p.m. records one at a time so that playing of the records can be accomplished continuously. However, after the entire stack of records has been played, it is required to remove the records from the turntable. It has, in the past, been a difficult procedure to so remove the records. Actually, the convenience of removing the records is so great that it is most common to simply eliminate the use of such adaptors.
There is a definite need for an adaptor to be employed in conjunction with the phonograph record centering spindle which would permit the playing of 45 r.p.m. records and would ease the removal of the stacked arrangement of 45 r.p.m. records to facilitate changing of the records or reinsertion of the records for play.